The heirs of a Jewish couple who fled the Nazis sued the Guggenheim over Picasso

A Pablo Picasso painting now valued at $200 million was sold for next to nothing by a Jewish couple desperate to flee the Nazis in 1938, and now the heirs want it back from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

A 1904 piece titled La repasseuse, Woman Ironing Clothes, was donated to the Guggenheim decades ago by an art dealer who paid a desperate Karl and Rosie Adler a measly $1,552 for it to escape the Holocaust, according to a lawsuit filed in Manhattan Supreme Court. . Friday.

“Adler would not have gotten rid of the painting at the time and at the price he did if it weren’t for the Nazi persecution he and his family endured and continue to endure,” claim the couple’s five current heirs. , some of whom are great-grandchildren.

"woman ironing" (La repasseuse) is now valued at $200 million.
The Woman Ironing Clothes (La repasseuse) is now valued at $200 million.
through Alami

“The painting is currently in the wrongful possession of the Guggenheim” and the foundation refused to give it up, the relatives say in legal documents that demand either the painting or its estimated value of $100 million to $200 million.

Karl Adler, a married father of three, was chairman of the largest leather manufacturer in Europe when Adolf Hitler and the Nazis came to power.

He bought Woman Ironing Clothes in 1916 from the then prestigious Munich gallerist Heinrich Thanhauser.

“In 1933, the establishment of the Nazi regime in Germany ruined their lives,” the heirs claim in court documents, recounting how Hitler quickly passed and enforced laws designed to deprive Jews of their property and destroy their social and business life.

A woman admires a runaway painting at an exhibition in 1952.
A woman admires a runaway painting at an exhibition in 1952.
Gamma Keystone via Getty Images

According to the lawsuit, Adler was originally trying to sell Picasso to raise money for an escape and was looking for $14,000 at the time. Today, that amount would be about $300,000.

He did not sell, and by 1937, Jews in Germany, including Adler, were put out of work by the Nazis. The family fled the country in June 1938, but instead of going straight to Argentina as planned, they were forced to travel around Europe, paying Nazi “flying taxes” and buying expensive short-stay visas. In 1940, when they finally managed to get to South America.

“The Adlers only needed large sums of cash to obtain short-term visas during their exile in Europe. Unable to work, on the run, and unsure of what the future holds, the Adlers were forced to liquidate everything they could in order to quickly raise as much money as possible,” court documents say.

This meant finally selling Picasso to Heinrich Tannhauser’s son, Justin, in October 1938 for $1,552 – about $32,000 in today’s dollars.

The Adlers were forced to sell the painting for next to nothing to escape the Nazis.
The Adlers were forced to sell the painting for next to nothing to escape the Nazis.
Getty Images

“Tannhauser bought comparable masterpieces from other German Jews who fled Germany and profited from their misfortune. Tannhauser was well aware of the plight of Adler and his family, and that if not for the persecution of the Nazis, Adler would never have sold the painting at that price, ”the heirs claim in the lawsuit.

“If Karl and Rosie had not escaped in time, they would undoubtedly have suffered a much more tragic fate at the hands of the Nazis,” the lawsuit says.

Rosie Adler died in 1946 in Buenos Aires at the age of 68, and 85-year-old Karl died in 1957 during a visit to his homeland. Neither Carl nor his children realized that they could lay claim to the painting, “which they mistakenly believed Thanhouser had acquired legally,” the heirs claimed.

Great-grandchildren, including California attorney Thomas Benningson, and about 10 nonprofits named in the will of one of Adler’s children are part of a lawsuit that cites the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act of 2016 as grounds for returning the artwork. of the year.

This isn’t the first time Bennigson has gone after his family’s stolen art. In 2009, he won a $6.5 million settlement from a Chicago collector who ended up with a 1922 Picasso painting Femme en blanc (Woman in White), which had once belonged to his mother Carlota, daughter of Carl and Rosie.

Tannhauser later emigrated to New York and eventually donated his art collection, including Woman Ironing Clothes, to the Guggenheim after his death in 1976.

The Adler family first contacted the Guggenheim about Woman Stroking in 2017, but the institution refused to return the “unique and irreplaceable” painting, they allege.

“This is unfair and contrary to a good conscience for [the Guggenheim] continue to benefit from holding the painting without payment,” the lawsuit says.

Guggenheim dismissed the lawsuit as “baseless” and said he took restitution issues “extremely seriously.” The museum, which said it had been discussing the allegations with lawyers for the heirs for several years, said it did “extensive research” on the painting and contacted Carl Adler’s son, Eric, in the 1970s to establish provenance. The Foundation noted that Eric Adler did not raise any alarms at the time.

“The lawsuit filed yesterday does not concern a painting that was stolen or confiscated by Nazi authorities,” the museum said in a statement. “Rather, the painting in question was sold by Karl Adler, a German Jew with extensive international business assets, to Justin Tannhauser, a prominent Jewish art dealer, in late 1938 or early 1939.”

Additional report by Isabelle Vincent

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texasstandard.news contributed to this report.

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